Initially All is Forgiven? was planned as just a standalone album, then as a staged musical, but now it has evolved into an Original Cast Album and a seven episode podcast which premiered on May 1 and is available for download on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Castro, Google Podcasts, Podcast Addict, Podchaser, etc. Onus Productions is posting the finale on May 29.

In 1993, “Serene” Dominic Salerno’s graphics editor job moved him from New York City to Phoenix, AZ and within a year’s time, mob informant Sammy “the Bull” Grevano was also relocated to to the Valley of the Sun under the Witness Protection Program. After turning on his overbosses in the Gotti crime family, Gravano didn’t stay clean for very long in the desert and in 2002 he was sentenced to twenty years for drug trafficking. Around the time of his release in 2017, Serene Dominic had already begun writing songs from the viewpoint of a low-level mob informant trying to adjust to his loss of Italian culture touchstones and the relative boredom of his new assumed life in Sunnyslope, AZ. Dominic plays the Baccala-out-of-water main Vic Masterone, informing the fictionalized character with many of his own personal feelings of displacement.

Serene: “Coming out to work in Arizona after living most of my life in The Bronx was a bit of a culture shock, but in a good way. It felt like being on a never-ending Club Med vacation for the first few years. Then came a point when I started thinking, ‘This is all well and good but shouldn’t I be going home by now?’ and having that feeling that I was never going to go home again was the impetus for writing All Is Forgiven? That and the realization that there hasn’t been an organized crime musical since Guys and Dolls. That’s bullshit.”

The album contains performances by Serene, JOOBS, June Jehad & Andrew Jemsek.

In recent years Dominic has had an odd sideline of writing stage musicals which he says he does because he can think of no better way to prop up even an more antiquated art form, the long playing album.

Serene: “We’ve gotten away from the idea that we sit and listen to an album and not do something else. Once upon a time we could do that but now we have to be on the go or driving or hiking just to listen to music. Doing a staged musical forces people to sit down, watch a performance and listen to a bunch of songs with an overarching story line and not try to do the dishes.

“And if you take away the musical aspect of this, you can say we’re reviving old time radio serials like ‘Lights Out,’ ‘The Shadow’ and ‘Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar.’ Yep, all the bygone entertainment delivery systems!”

He did that with the crew of Pan Productions for Swimming in The Head (a musical retelling of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo) in 2015 and again with the noir musical Dark Lullaby in 2018. The Mafia aspects of it may be loosely based on real-life events but the story goes off on an odd, almost supernatural tangent where no existing mob story has gone before.

Taking a musical that would normally have run 90 minutes and serializing it meant structuring each podcast almost a soap opera with a running time of roughly 25 minutes and having each episode ending with a cliffhanger. And each episode contains three songs, including some bonus songs not on the Cast Album and incidental music by Serene and Musical Director Steve Asetta (Moonlight Magic, San Jacinto Prison Band). The podcast’s narrator is former Phoenix New Times editor and columnist Peter Gilstrap. He currently produces for radio and writes scripts in Hollywood, USA!

In addition to Serene Dominic, this first-ever Onus podcast contains the acting and vocal talents of JOOBS (who plays the villain Gemeleye), Dayna Donovan (who plays the exotic dancer Shanabella), Jude Jehad (who sings lead on three numbers) and acting cameos from all seven members of San Jacinto Prison Band. Plans to rerecord some of the show’s songs for an upcoming new album are up in the air since the pandemic but will hopefully occur by the fall. There are also tentative plans to possibly serialize Dominic’s last musical Dark Lullaby in podcast format to follow up All Is Forgiven? in the fall.

Serene: “In some ways this project, which was conceived before the pandemic has weirdlypredicted a lot of what has happened to us in the past seven weeks. Even putting it together was done in a kind of social distancing environment that was completely alien to everybody involved in previous theater productions. No two actors were ever in the same room doing their lines at any point in the production so hopefully one day we can have a Zoom get together so all the cast members can actually meet each other. I hope that this kind of podcast finds an audience and that those who tune in each Friday in the month of May will find something hopeful in its characters or that it provides a suitably weird distraction from our current malaise.”

If you would like to learn more about this podcast, Onus Productions and the cast album please contact Serene at serenedominic@gmail.com.

With Rubber Dagger, Jim Andreas, Chris Kennedy, James Karnes and William Goethe have carved out a fourth musical go-round that might be No Volcano’s most poppy, hurly-burly meisterwork yet!

Its none-too-subtle send-up of the Fab Four featuring our fab forefathers on a mind-bender may be a sly comment on our country’s current craven tumult. On closer examination, Rubber Dagger offers takes on every slice of life you can expect in 2020 America. Our divisive nation can be dissected along two dueling party lines, “Extrovert” and “Introvert,” both of which the group has conveniently provided vibrant theme songs for. “Extrovert” previews the album with a new video by director Jason Willis, who crafted the band’s previous videos for “Blackout” and “Day in the Sun.” Our social media disconnection is also duly noted on “Logged In” as is the end of civility in our national discourse in “Negative Attention.” Even the abandonment of space exploration, once a source of civic pride, is dashed in songs like “Rocket” and “Lines in Space.”

No Volcano, The Dukes of New Windsor as photographed by Mike Dee.

But all that is bubbling below the surface. This is first and foremost a pop album, possibly the best No Volcano had produced yet. If this were a more enlightened time, No Volcano would be considered a singles band and wear it like a badge of honor. The Beatles allusion on the cover can be vaguely felt musically in the group’s sunshine harmonies and economical song lengths—only two songs crest over three minutes and No Volcano crams a lot of information in what the group likes to call “miniatures.” You may decry the lack of a middle eight in a favorite album track that ends too soon but Rubber Dagger is harmonically programmed so each song neatly dovetails into the next, even if you scramble the album running order (and No Volcano is fully aware that an album’s sequence is tampered with mightily once it is imported into iTunes, and for this reason they issued their second album in alphabetical order!).

To quote Jim Andreas, Chris Kennedy, James Karnes and William Goethe who collectively make up No Volcano directly, “Uhmmm, yeah.”

No Volcano, wishing you and yours the rubbery-ist of daggers. From left to right, Jim Andreas, William Goethe, Chris Kennedy and James Karnes.

In the back of old comic books, just below the X-ray specs and spiders on a string, a rubber dagger was merely a harmless novelty, something to amuse easily amused friends and neighbors. In the hands of No Volcano, a Rubber Dagger an instrument of distraction that will most assuredly slay you in 13 swift and sharp cuts. This fourth musical go-round from Sunnyslope’s most progressive musical spawn might be No Volcano’s most poppy, hurly-burly meisterwork yet!

Its none-too-subtle send-up of the Fab Four subbed by our fab forefathers on a mind-bender may be a sly comment on our country’s current craven tumult. On closer examination, Rubber Dagger offers takes on every slice of life you can expect to endure in 2020 America. Our divisive nation can be dissected along two dueling party lines, “Extrovert” and “Introvert,” both of which the group has conveniently provided vibrant theme songs for. “Extrovert” previews the album with a new video by director Jason Willis, who crafted the band’s previous videos for “Blackout” and “Day in the Sun.” Our social media disconnection is also duly noted on “Logged In” as is the end of civility in our national discourse in “Negative Attention.” Even the abandonment of space exploration, once a source of civic pride, is dashed in songs like “Rocket” and “Lines in Space.”

But all that is bubbling below the surface. This is first and foremost a pop album, possibly the best No Volcano had produced yet. If this were a more enlightened time, No Volcano would be considered a singles band and wear it like a badge of honor. The Beatles allusion on the cover can be vaguely felt musically in the group’s sunshine harmonies and economical song lengths—only two songs crest over three minutes and No Volcano crams a lot of information in what the group likes to call “miniatures.” You may decry the lack of a middle eight in a favorite album track that ends too soon but Rubber Dagger is harmonically programmed so that each song neatly dovetails into the next, even if you randomly scramble the album’s running order (and No Volcano is fully aware that an album’s sequence is fucked with mightily once it is imported into iTunes and for this reason No Volcano issued their second album in alphabetical order!).

Standouts on the album include “Golden,” favored to be the next single and featuring a vocal guest spot by Lonna Kelley and “Miracles,” which features the band rocking out in waltz time, yet another thing the Liverpudlian sons also brought to the masses. In short, get your grimy hands around Rubber Dagger, the most flexible yet sharpest precision tool you’ll ever own!

Thank you for auditioning for this original musical. We’ve enclosed pdfs with brief passages by three of the main characters. We ask that you practice this scene or scenes and work out a song which you think captures the mood of the scene and your singing ability at its best.

If you wish to fill a minor role as either an extra or a member of the chorus, please prepare a brief spoken or sung piece.

“Spring” and “release” are two words that make San Jacinto Prison Band’s lawyers take notice but in this case it means Onus Records is readying two new CDs for April, San Jacinto Prison Band’s sophomore effort Unfreedom Rock and World Class Thugs long-awaited (8 years in the making) third album Southwestern Dirt Circuit. With overlap of personnel in both bands it made sense to combine forces for a CD double CD release show at Chopper John’s April 26 with special guest Fatigo.

San Jacinto Prison BandUnfreedom RockFear of Suge Knight retribution led them to drop “Death Row” from their name but these melodious felons still perform each song as if their life sentence hangs in the balance. Last year, bandleader Serene Dominic assembled the sextet to be the pit band for his musical Dark Lullaby. The band adopted nine of the show’s songs as their live set which made the balance of their first CD, Sing Dark Lullaby.

“We learned the Act One songs from Dark Lullaby first and later learned and recorded the balance of the show for the cast album, ” Dominic says. “A lot of those Act Two songs turned out to be some of the best things we’ve ever done, so we decided to make them part of a new album instead of a standalone EP. Filling out Unfreedom Rock are new versions of four older Serene Dominic songs and two brand new ones written specifically for this band — “Conjugal Visit,” which demonstrates the band’s flexibility to stray into rock-jazz territory, and “Testosterone,” an odd tribute the disco-era Bee Gees which contains falsetto and false bravado in equal measure.

“Sonically, it’s all over the place, which made me think of old Stones’ US albums like December’s Children, which were slapped together from a lot of sources but in retrospect, hung together much better than some of their intended UK albums,” says Dominic, who also created a music video for the CD’s lead-off track, “2791 (A New Delivery System),” a collage of retro futuristic imagery and men in stripes trying to find a place in the world of tomorrow. Muses Dominic, “It’s a happy song about the future for a change and I hope the video reflects that.

World Class Thugs Southwestern Dirt CircuitWhy did this record take so goddamned long? In the time that it would conceive and raise an 8-year-old, World Class Thugs looked after their own collective spawn and spun off into some side projects (Jim Dustan in Psycho Square Dance and San Jacinto Prison, Jim and Jocelyn Fox in RPM Orchestra), all the while woodshedding this collection of tunes about drug fueled years, trazodone men, red eyes and crazy quilts. The long awaited follow-up to their second CD, Curio, sounds very much like the carnival has come to town with some delightful delicacies, a couple of suspect rides and a few sideshow attractions that have gone to seed.

New members to the thug life include Trent Morue (Vinegar Sting, Haunted Cologne) on bass, Andrew Jemsek (Moonlight Magic, San Jacinto Prison Band, Haunted Cologne) on keyboards and accordion and Carter Dukarm (Zany Guys, Psycho Square Dance) on pedal steel.

And Southwestern Dirt Circuit, named after Dustan’s annual birthday jamfest, sounds very good indeed, a melting potpourri of Americana styles and characters who, as Dustan puts it , are “fueled by Arizona oddities and low tales of desert sorrows.”Click here to stream Southwestern Dirt Circuit.

By now you’re probably already sick of 2019 and waiting for the day you will have 2020 hindsight and everything will make sense. Serene Dominic feels your ennui and that’s why Onus Records is launching the Serene Dominic Countdown to 2020 series. Each day he will post a random song from his Onus Records back catalog picked at random and add any pertinent information about it that will allow you to download it and purchase the album it happens to land on. When possible we will also add a video link to view as well. In doing this together, maybe we can all countdown to a more knowledgable future, at least where Serene Dominic is concerned.

We also will keep releasing Singles of the Weekend when new ones are made available and every Wednesday will be feature a different video of an Onus Recording artist for “Video Vednesday,” an admittedly stupid name for a recurring post that only Zsa Zsa Gabor would not flinch at.

Serene 20/20 Self-Analysis: “People love to muse about the first thing they would do if they ever came into a lot of money or won the lottery. Before 2009 my answer was always the same, have a home recording studio. I never amassed a fortune either way, but that year, I had a decent enough tax return to buy tax return to buy a good microphone and a used MacBook with Garageband on it and that’s how I recorded Unnatural Blonde, a song cycle based on the 1958 movie classic Vertigo which later became the first musical I ever wrote, Swimming in the Head.

“Since the song is written from the viewpoint of Gavin Elster, the Hitchcock cad who kills his rich wife and inherits all her lazy money, I don’t think it offers any insight into my inner life except I like to see people getting big checks. I actually made one for this video which I use when I occasionally do this song as The Human Torch. People like to take pictures with the Human Torch but they like posing with the Torch and a ginormous check for 10 million dollars even more.”

“I also don’t like to work blue but the cussing on this record made me have to put a Parental Advisory Label on the cover. I think there’s a “Mutherfucker” on the Cast Album of Dark Lullaby. Something about musicals, I guess.”

Song it most closely rips off: “It owes a lot to ‘Mickey’s Monkey” which it samples the Rascals version of for this recording, along with their ‘Do You Feel It.’ You know I do.”